How to sell on eBay – Sellers Journey to $100,000 a Month

eBay awards Max and myself with a certificate of achievement for outstanding sales, 2012

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” – Laozi

My partner Max Godin and myself learned how to sell on eBay and opened our eBay store in mid 2008, Ever since then it’s been a long journey, from our accounts being suspended, to grossing over $100,000 in monthly sales and winning eBay awards for outstanding sales.

Israel may have made a name for itself regarding technological innovation, but it’s a lagger when it comes to eCommerce. With a tiny population of 7 million and no neighboring countries to trade with, developing an eCommerce business from Israel is nearly “mission impossible”.

Being Israeli-based online merchants, we constantly had a lower starting point:

No local market

Expensive shipping

Language/time zone/culture barriers

No local support from eBay
And the list goes on…

In the upcoming posts I’ll be sharing everything we’ve learned in the past 7 years, in hope of inspiring some other eBay sellers.

Why the hell share?!

While our eCommerce company is alive and kicking – CameraKings.co.uk (LGO eCommerce ltd) – with offices, and awesome staff running it from London (*my love to Sam, Oli and Kash 😉 ), in early 2014 Max and myself invested every penny of profit we’d made and launched a startup company – CrazyLister. Initially built to help grow our own eBay sales, CrazyLister is now (Jul, 2015) used by more than 12,000 eBay sellers from 84 countries, to create over 500,000 professional eBay listings.

CameraKings London showroom, pop in next time you’re around

Our eCommerce experience taught us to obsessively concentrate on the customer. I’m easily tempted to find more “urgent” startup tasks, that create more “value” for CrazyLister users than blogging. There is always “that cool new feature to develop”, or “the new support system to install”, or “add more eBay tools”…

What served as an eye opener for me was an article named:
“Should Startups Blog?” by Jay Acunzo from nextviewventures
Backed by years of experience and hard numbers, Jay summarizes the answer to when a startup should write a blog:
When the blog “Solves the same problem the product solves”.

This is when it hit me – CrazyLister helps sellers get an edge over the competition and increase eBay sales. Writing a blog and sharing all the tips, tricks and how-tos we know does exactly the same!

Are you working your ass off to grow your sales?

This is the blog I wish I had read back at the beginning. It’s going to cover the lessons we’ve learned from our own experiences combined with what we’re learning now from the CrazyLister community, including tests, wins and fails, backed up with real numbers. Everything from eBay template design, customer support, technology, strategy, marketing, sales, growth hacking, hiring, finance, shipping, vendors and more.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that there aren’t any good resources for you to learn about these things. There are tons of amazing eBay forums, websites, blogs, groups, out there. More successful eBay sellers, better bloggers and writers – I know, because I follow as many of them as I can, and I’ll be posting the best of them in this blog. But what we’re aiming for with this blog is a “purely tactical” approach – you won’t find “theoretical, abstract stuff” here; every post will have actionable takeaways that you can test and implement to increase your eBay sales.

Everything we write about will be hard earned lessons from our own experience and from what we learn from CrazyLister’s community.

What You’ll Learn

Starting from our next post, we’ll be describing – in detail – how we took an eCommerce business from a suspended eBay account to an award-winning business, generating over $100,000 in monthly sales, and continue to write about what we’re learning today.

We’ll be sharing everything, including:

How we got an edge over the competition, selling at prices 20% higher.

How we recovered from a suspended eBay account to top the eBay search results in 2 weeks.

How we wasted over $5000 on a bad branding video (and how we later created an awesome one for $60).

How we survived nearly 200 parcels ($100+ each) being lost for 2 months due to the Chinese mailing service overload during Christmas 2011.

So What’s Next?

Hopefully, you’ll join us on our journey. It’s totally free, and you don’t have to be a CrazyLister customer (though you’re more than welcome to sign up for free here).

Our goal is enabling you to get an edge over your competition and increase sales on eBay. To get each post emailed to you as soon as it’s published, sign up for the mailing list at the bottom of this page.

In my next post i’ll be be writing about:

7 eBay Hacks We Learned Growing Sales from Zero to $100k/ Month
See you next week. Have something you want to learn more about? Let me know in the comments below or hit me up on Twitter.

You have got my interest! Great reading so far. Will you be telling us what types of products you sold that you did so well at selling on eBay? Looking forward to your next post, I signed up for your blog so I would get the next installment right away when you post it. Thanks for sharing your knowledge!

Thanks Marilyn 🙂 this is so encouraging!
Will of course share everything

Maxim Godin

Marilyn,
we’ll be providing actionable advice based on our own experience which will include case studies of our own sales on eBay, we’ve actually published a post about how we increased our conversion rates by 220% on eBay, you are welcome tot have a look:http://blog.crazylister.com/the-perfect-ebay-listing/

Hi Emily, i’d suggest searching eBay for the items you sell, and adding those sellers who appear at the top of search results to your “favorites” list.
Here is eBay’s tutorial on how to follow sellers:http://pages.ebay.com/help/buy/save-sellers.html

Marilyn McCoy Walker

That is an excellent idea!

Chen R

Thank You for sharing this with us 🙂
will there be any tips about how to ensure that it will be a steady income ?

Hi Chen, yes definitely.
Like any business, building a sustainable / steady income from eComemrce is a process (i don’t believe in instant success stories). I’ll be sharing everything we’ve learned from our process, hoping to inspire some other merchants.

Matt Godwin

Very inspiring story! Pointing out the pitfalls could save other folks in the space a lot of anguish – looking forward to future posts!

Thanks Matt,
we’re excited about sharing our story and more importantly, helping others avoid the mistakes we did to grow their sales faster.
Stay tuned for more..

dj_remickz

They failed to mention how easily and without merit or proof eBay and their retarded cousin PayPal can suspend your account(s) by someone simply accusing the seller of selling counterfeit or stolen merchandise, which can take weeks to resolve…I personally have had over 30,000 transactions as a seller but in no way would want to depend on eBay for my sole income, as it can all come crashing down with no advance warning.

does your software all ORDERS to be exported into csv and PRINTED without the 250 pages per time limit? eg. we have 700 orders, inkfrog only allows us to print 250 pages…and then another 250 pages etc,